Jocs, triquets i jugadors [Games, ball courts and players]- La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
- Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
- Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
- Barcelona, 2009
- 237 pages
Jocs, triquets i jugadors (2009), the third volume in the Barcelona 1700 collection, presents three extensive articles, the first two spanning more than one hundred pages each, written, respectively, by Albert Garcia Espuche, who describes “Una ciutat de triquets i jugadors” [A city of ball courts and players]; Paloma Sànchez and Esther Sarrà, who present “Naips, l’origen. Una aproximació” [Cards, the origin. An overview], and Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero, who, together with Núria Miró i Alaix, documents the archaeological findings in El Born related to this area in the article “Jugar a la Barcelona dels segles XVI-XVII: objectes de joc i joguines trobats a les excavacions de la ciutat” [Games in the Barcelona of the 16th and 17th centuries: game objects and toys found in the city’s excavations].
Anybody who is interested in forms of socialisation knows that both now and in the past, games –or esport, to use the more modern term in Catalan, although this word actually dates from the end of the 19th century, and using it in the context of the 17th century is anachronistic– not only “unleash passions” but are also a magnificent way of promoting social relationships. Through games and gambling, which have always gone hand in hand, one realises (as in the case of festivals) just how social groups define a region, how economic transactions are managed and how the city can pick up on and appropriate a vast number of foreign influences. In the words of Garcia Espuche: “Games show, as do other areas, that the Catalan capital absorbed foreign cultural elements, but that it also created and spread other ones, conceived locally.”
As the materials inherent in games are by nature perishable, there are few remaining objects and even fewer pictures related to this area. In Barcelona there are no period drawings or paintings that represent game pieces, which is easy to understand if we recall the expression “jocs de mans, jocs de vilans” (hand games are villains’ games), and that only nobles or the well-to-do purchased paintings. Neither was material culture held in any great social esteem, which explains why the dolls and toys of the era in general, such as cards, billiards or the ball court balls, are known to us more by dint of descriptions –and government prohibitions– rather than thanks to any material in the hands of collectors. Nevertheless, notarial documents and post-mortem inventories show that most homes normally had “playing cards” and sometimes even a chess set, albeit few.
The synodal constitutions of 1673 prohibited the sale of “clay dolls”, the cheap toy youngsters played with, “at the gates, walls and porticoes of this City’s Churches”. We also know the problems caused by the so-called “pedrades” (stone fights, not between young people from different streets, but rather organised events which even had rules), and we also have information on how people cheated at cards or used loaded dice. When all is said and done, the modern-day tricksters that work La Rambla are hardly new and are to be found in all maritime cities. This book records a substantial part of the recreational and festive life of the inhabitants of Barcelona in the 17th and early 18th centuries, from the innocent games of youngsters through to the vice associated with taverns and prostitution.
According to Miquel Ribes, a gentleman hailing from Granollers who visited Barcelona during the 1616 Carnival, the inhabitants of Barcelona “play polla/ pilota, argolla/ and passa Déu”. Polla is the amount wagered on the table in card games; the pilota is the French jeu de paume, a forerunner of tennis, and argolla is a halfway-house between cricket and golf. The meaning of the expression Passa Déu remains unknown. The game of billiards in Barcelona dates from 1682. Trinquets (ball courts) were places for games (although not necessarily ball games, as they are nowadays in Valencia). The trinquet was not actually a game in itself, but rather a recreational venue, sometimes with more or less covert prostitution; Garcia Espuche has identified 21, and there was at least one, the Casa de la Lleona, that was blatantly aristocratic and Pro-Habsburg, leading it to be shut down by Phillip V’s troops.
One interesting case is the joc de l’auca (a variant of Snakes and Ladders), very probably conceived in Florence circa 1580. Louis XIII of France is known to have played this game as a child in 1612. In Catalonia, the printer from Moià Pere Abadal printed a primitive Snakes and Ladders circa 1675, with white boxes containing drawings. Nevertheless, as history is full of surprises, apparently this auca is also derived from roulette. In a nutshell, when you study the history of people without history, you discover that our 18th-century ancestors, far from being peevish prigs who spent most of their time in churches and smelt of candle wax, were fun-loving and outgoing people.
It should therefore come as no surprise –some things never change– that the authorities in the 17th and 18th centuries clearly sought to control games and gambling to prevent them from becoming a source of disturbances, cheating and vice. The role of games, how they spread and how systems of control grew up around them (and even possible associated public order problems), is an excellent mirror of social tensions. Garcia Espuche’s thesis, which holds that such games did not generate social tensions, but that they coexisted with “a high city, noble and passive; a low city, commercial and active; a silent and reverential levitic city, and a popular city, moderately given to vice”, allows an excellent insight into social segmentation in Barcelona in modern times.